Christian Responsibility to Contemporary Literature

Briefly put, the argument which I wish to promote is this: (a) that eventually every category of human endeavor, the writing of plays and novels included, must come under the leavening touch of Christianity; (b) that the Christian public can accelerate this leavening if they will participate enthusiastically and with intelligent discrimination in the experiences which the best of modern literature provides; and (c) that some of the confusions which cause the public to turn its back on modern writing can be removed by an understanding of where and how the leaven works.

These confusions, it seems to me, have three sources. First is the suspicion that there exists some fundamental antagonism between Christianity and the creative process. Another is the notion that the vision of life which underlies much recent writing is spiritually barren and therefore unrewarding. Third, there is the vexed question of the relation between literature and morality.

Christianity And Creativity

One thoughtful commentator has this to say about the relationship between Christianity and human creativity:

“For the poets the scandal of Christ is his asceticism. The very element of their experience as men, is the gamut of human living, emotions, drama. ‘Man’s resinous heart’ and the loves, loyalties, the pride, the grief it feeds—these are the stuff of poetry and the sense of life. And the Cross lays its shadow on this; it draws away all the blood from the glowing body of existence and leaves it mutilated and charred in the hope of some thin ethereal felicity. The wine of life is changed to water.… The ‘dramatic caves’ of the human heart and imagination are renounced for some wan empyrean of spiritual revery.… The refusal of religion by the modern poet and by more than moderns and by more than poets, goes back to the apparent denial of human living by religion, to the supposed incompatibility of life with Life and of art with faith” (Amos Wilder, The Spiritual Aspects of the New Poetry, p. 196).

The key phrase is “supposed incompatibility.” Just as the leaven does not destroy the meal but rather alters its chemical essence, so Christianity does not deprive the writer of his subject, man’s “resinous heart” with its “dramatic caves,” but enables the writer to bring to bear upon his work and his life a transcendent ideal which will help him to make sense out of both. And if we accept the idea, as it seems to me we must, that literature, like all the arts, is a technique which creative human beings have evolved down through the centuries as an instrument to aid them in their need to find patterns of order, ultimately of value, in the flux of day-by-day experience, then not only is there no genuine conflict between art and faith: there is an indissoluble connection welding them together. The principle which allows us to interpret experience in a meaningful way is not to be found in experience itself but outside and above it.

The Shaping Vision

The vital relations between Christianity and the shaping vision which underlies any play or novel or poem are outlined by one critic as follows:

“We have said that the work of literary art is a special sort of linguistic structure that traps the attention intransitively; but we have also argued that the intransitivity of the reader’s attention is not absolute. The literary work is a trap, but it is a trap that is oriented toward the world of existence that transcends the work—and the work is oriented by the vision, by the belief, by the ultimate concern of which it is an incarnation: its orientation, that is to say, is essentially religious. And this is why criticism itself must, in the end, be theological” (Nathan A. Scott, Jr., “The Collaboration of Vision in the Poetic Act,” Literature and Belief, p. 133).

Last summer, after reading this passage for the first time, I sat down to fabricate a tool of analysis which would enable me to dissect recent novels and plays in order to discover how much of the leaven may be found at work in the author’s vision of life. What I came up with is this: Each literary work projects a world of people and events much like our “real” world, and just as our world has a distinguishable character because of the nature of the forces which created it, so has each literary world a specific character; by analyzing that character we can infer, though only indirectly, to be sure, the shaping forces, the ultimate concerns of the writer in the act of writing his book or play.

Let me illustrate with Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a modern retelling of one of the oldest of stories—man’s attempt to rediscover and re-enter the Garden of Paradise. Steinbeck erects his plot on five verses in the fourth chapter of Genesis, that very familiar passage in which Cain and Abel bring an offering to Jehovah. The crucial verse is this one: “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” The word “him” here refers not to Abel but to sin, and the Authorized Version thus promises that man shall someday gain dominion over sin.

The Hebrew verb rendered “thou shalt rule” by the King James translators is timshel, and one of the important characters in Steinbeck’s novel, Lee, the Chinese servant in the Trask family, begins to suspect that buried in that one word is a key to the conquest of human evil. He consults with a group of Chinese scholars about it, and after two years of study they conclude that timshel ought to be translated “thou mayest rule,” not “thou shalt rule.” East of Eden is an attempt to dramatize the difference. One gives the promise of victory; the other gives only the chance of victory, thereby making man totally responsible for his destiny.

Full analysis of the novel will reveal what the above paragraph merely suggests, that the shaping vision behind it is thoroughly humanistic. Thus, since the teachings of Christianity are unalterably theistic, we conclude that there is only a modicum of the leaven at work here.

What We Can Give

But this discovery, it would seem, is not nearly so important as our response to it. Shall we, upon finding only minimal traces of primitive Christianity, turn away from recent fiction and drama because it is materialistic, is spiritually sterile and dry? We probably shall, as many have, if we approach literature primarily in terms of getting something from it—moral inspiration, say. But if we approach it in terms of what we can give, of what we can bring to it in the way of clear thinking and strong, ethical affections so as to enter into a positive, give-and-take transaction with it, keeping in mind that in time every sort of human activity must feel the impact of Christian concepts, then we shall turn not away from contemporary literature but toward it.

This distinction between getting and giving is even more important when we consider the connection between literature and morality, a subject made enormously complex by the number of elements which it comprises. We may speak, for example, of the relationship between the writer and his novel or play and hold up for inspection the idea that only a morally good man can produce a good book. Or we may come at the topic from the other side and examine the relationship between a book and its readers, and here there are a number of things to be distinguished: the words, obscene or not; the behavior of the characters, moral or not; their ideas, evil or not; and the vision of life which forms the entire book, true or not.

Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye may be taken to illustrate these distinctions. Because it contains offensive language, instances of censurable behavior, and a number of reprehensible ideas, many readers would label it an immoral book. But in doing that they may have overlooked the most significant scene in the novel, the one which provided its title, in which Holden explains to Phoebe his vision of standing in a rye field full of small children to guard them from plunging over a cliff. This is his way of making sense out of the terrifyingly chaotic world which envelops him, a world empty of values but full of phonies, and if we accept the idea that literature has some basic part to play in the human search for order, then the worth of this one scene ought to outweigh what we may regard as the worthlessness of the other elements. Catcher in the Rye is thus seen to be a mixed product, one requiring careful thought if it is to be evaluated sensibly.

The Christian Response

Now, the question of whether or not a book is morally contaminating, or potentially so, raises the corollary question, How shall we respond? Politics is also regarded by some to be morally contaminating, but is that justification for insulating ourselves from it? It may be that if the thinking majority in America, including thoughtful Christians, were confronting serious works of literary art—reading them, pondering them, debating them with friends, writing about them—then their enlightened attention would provide a channel through which more of the leaven could reach the meal.

Two qualifications are in order here. Obviously not everyone will have the time to do this; many will be totally absorbed in other duties. Secondly, I am speaking only of books with aesthetic merit. Reading books without it can scarcely be defended. But if a book does show merit, it is worth meeting face to face, just as any human being, because of the potential that is in him, it worth meeting face to face. We meet the book, and then judge it; we may judge harshly, but if this judgment is a genuine act of the intelligence, something worthwhile has occurred.

Let me summarize now with a final assertion. Contemporary literature deserves our concern, and if we will bring to it the best that we possess in the way of wisdom, sensitivity, and Christian conviction, it may well be that in time a literature will emerge that is fully responsive to the leaven of Christian concepts, a literature capable of standing in equality with all else that is good in human experience—capable, as William Faulkner remarked in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, of helping man to endure and prevail on this planet by “lifting his heart.”

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